Weird Stuff that added flavor
As any good technologist has new “weird stuff” knocking on the door while he is focusing on some other technology. This is also the theme of how my resume got built.
Python was the first programming language I started my career with. At that time I was working on code generators,compiler switches and other “weird stuff” while my friends were working on struts and j2ee. So with much effort I moved to those technologies.Working in banking domain in mid 2000s we would create jobs to facilitate what was then called as business intelligence.These were early ancestors of data cleaning, aggregation and summarization that was done via code and service via ui. It didn’t feel amazing but it was work so we did it.
Enter ChatBots
Cut to 2009s I was obsessed with JavaScript ,Spring and whole SMAC buzz and then another “weird stuff” came my way . There we were building a chatting bot for relationship managers to support the internet banking users .I used the IBM SameTime stack while my colleagues used MS stack. Out bot could do basic chat and then allow screen sharing and video calls.
Post 2010 while I was chasing Angular ,microservices and my Ethical hacker certification, another “weird stuff” called Hadoop came along. So there I was working on MapReduce, Storm and Spark. We had do some Data Science work using Apache’s MLLib. My background with BI allowed me to work on it but converting beautiful data structures to some numbers and flags didn’t seem like calling to the programmer in me 🙂 ,so I was very happy when Data Scientist joined our team. By this time it was clear that DS was the hottest job of the decade but I had moved on to Node and Dockers of the world and then another “weird stuff” called R came along. And again i was supposed to build a chat application .I was so angry to have my “When Harry meets Sally” moment that a wrote a blog post against chatbots 🙂 (here).
ChatBots strike again
It was by this time that the role of AI-Architect was coined ,brining me peace .So I moved on to a projects working full time on AI and Automation .Our projects had working going on neural network of all kinds and all of were hands on. But industry had some other plan .A “weird stuff” called a chatbot came knocking on the door .So there I was building chatbots on multiple frameworks.We had Alexa,Google’s Dialogflow,Amazon and IBMs stacks and open source framework called RASA. Not to forget mentioning our Inhouse AI Studio/Chatbot solution called NIA that my friend GuruPrasad was developing .
This was probably the Jurassic age of bots .